Mr. Alder may have written a book about the metric system, but why doesn't he respect its use in France? The 600 mile Meridienne Verte? Maybe the kilometer is less suited to human needs than the statute mile. He must have converted everything metric he encountered during his Tour de France to ifp. More proof to me that in the end both are opposed to metric.
Quote: " To come to terms with this history, I set out to retrace their journey. In the year 2000, at a time when France was celebrating the millennium along the Meridienne Verte - a six-hundred-mile row of evergreen trees which was meant to mark out the national meridian, but which was somehow never planted - I set out on the zigzag trail of Delambre and M�chain. I climbed the cathedral towers and mountain peaks from which they conducted their survey, and combed the provincial archives for traces of their passage. It was my own Tour de France. Delambre and M�chain had demonstrated that the judicious application of scientific knowledge might, as Archimedes once boasted, move the world. Where they traveled by carriage and on foot, I substituted a bicycle. After all, what is a bicycle but a lever on wheels? - a lever which allows the cyclist to move along the surface of the world, or, which is much the same thing, move the world. Han Historian of Dutch Metrication, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
